History
Ballentine Vineyards has been dedicated to farming our land sustainably for over 100 years. Our family’s focus is on producing the highest quality grapes and wines from our vineyards and sustaining our Napa Valley traditions for generations to come.
We strive to make intelligent choices that maximize our quality while minimizing our impact on the land. With the building of our winery, the family has had a dedication to the preservation of our farming traditions. The winery was designed to collect the rainwater from our rooftop and be used for both frost protection and irrigation, we have been a solar-powered winery for over a decade, and our latest addition is a treatment plan that allows us to recycle every drop of water used in the winery and place it back into the field to irrigate our vineyard.
For four generations now we have been dedicated to seeing our ranch achieve the highest quality, and we hope to carry on farming for many more years to come!
The story of the Ballentine and Pocai Families winds its way from Lucca, Italy, and Omagh, County Tyrone, Ireland into the beautiful Napa Valley where the family has been making wines from the same estate vineyards since 1906. Today, Betty Pocai Ballentine along with son Frank Ballentine continues to produce delicious award-winning wines and provide authentic experiences of a working boutique winery. It is a hidden gem of what Napa Valley used to be juxtaposed with the emerging future of wine and the wine lifestyle.
Van and Betty Ballentine’s son, Frank Ballentine, has a passion and drive to find new, exciting breakthroughs in the food and wine industries.
Fueled by his birthplace and childhood stomping grounds in Napa Valley vineyards, Frank began combining his interests in wine and business while attending UC Davis Enology Program. He crafted his own major, “Vineyards and Winery Management,” and went on to add an MBA as his interest in business grew.
After a few years as a winemaker, his passion grew to include food; he built a successful food manufacturing and distribution career and went on to hold senior management positions at Odwalla right before and during its rapid growth. Ever a student, he is a frequent visitor to Stanford and Harvard’s executive management programs to discover best practices to apply to improve the family business.
In 2012, Frank began a partnership with his aging parents, to manage the Ballentine Family Estate Vineyards. Along the way, his love of the land and the science of vineyard management was rekindled.
As he worked shoulder to shoulder with Bruce Devlin, the winemaker, they both realized they shared a desire to explore the pinnacle of incredible viticulture and wine-making fit for the future of a changing Napa Valley and shifting demographics.
Since that time, Frank and Bruce constantly experiment with the 100+-year-old vineyards to discover their ever-evolving potential to create new gems of great wine every year. They’ve refreshed the vineyards with strong science and engage innovatively in wine-making aimed at providing their guests with new and different experiences in the Napa Valley. They aim to remain the Hidden Gem of Napa Valley through innovation ever delighting and surprising themselves and their guests.
Frank not only works with our winery but is also the President of GreenLeaf in San Francisco, a leading, high-quality produce and specialty product business. Between the two businesses, Frank stays very busy. In Frank’s time away from all the action, he loves to take his son Ryan hunting, daughter Audrey salmon fishing in Alaska. and explore the world with his wife, Linda.